The profits would be enough to pay for 9,178 doctors or 19,428 nurses during the period. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA
[Guardian] Exclusive: MPs say profit-making levels in England are ‘scandalous’ and call for cap on amount private companies can make from NHS
Private firms providing services to the NHS including healthcare and consultancy have made £1.6bn in profits over the last two years, research reveals.
The findings – on the basis of contracts worth £12bn – have prompted claims of “scandalous” profiteering, concern that the health service is being “taken for a ride” and calls for ministers to impose a cap on maximum profit levels.
The £1.6bn in profits made in 2023-24 and 2024-25 would have been enough to pay for 9,178 doctors or 19,428 nurses during that time, according to the Centre for Health and the Public Interest.
Its findings are based on analysis of NHS contracts in England, with 760 private firms providing services including diagnostic tests such as CT scans to patients, and treatments including hip and knee replacements, and for skin problems and mental health conditions.
The thinktank found:
£2bn of the £12bn of contracts went to firms with owners based outside the UK.
£533m of that £2bn went to companies owned by people living in tax havens such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands.
Firms, especially those owned by private equity outfits, used £353m of their £12bn NHS income to pay interest on debts.
Nigel Farage speaks during a press conference on May 27, 2025 in London, England. | Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
Nigel Farage says his party is a break from the political establishment. That claim doesn’t match up with its donors
Reform has received almost £5m from wealthy donors since 2023, including those with links to fossil fuels, the financial services industry and tax havens, openDemocracy can reveal.
Nigel Farage’s party received around £1.5m in large donations in the first quarter of this year – far less than the £3.3m given to the Conservatives and £2.3m to Labour – according to our analysis of Electoral Commission data published this week.
The figures are likely particularly disappointing for Reform’s leadership, which has boasted of a major fundraising drive this year, as they don’t include a further £1m that the Tories reportedly received in recent weeks from software and gaming entrepreneur Jeremy San.
But what does the £4.8m of donations tell us about Reform’s aims, especially if it were to win office at the next general election? openDemocracy analysed the past 18 months of donations data to shed light on who is donating to the party – and where their interests lie.
Our findings reveal that, despite claiming to represent a break with the current political establishment, Reform is largely funded by ex-Tory donors, who account for around a quarter of the £4.8m it has received in large donations (only those who give £11,180 or more in a year need to be declared to the Electoral Commission) since 2023.
We also found that Reform has an unusually high number of overseas backers with links to tax havens, which the party has publicly stated is part of its fundraising strategy.
While the party previously criticised Labour’s £4m donation from a Cayman Islands-controlled hedge fund, which openDemocracy revealed last year, more than 10% of its total donations are from sources with strong offshore ties.
How much has Reform raised?
Reform looks set to receive more money in large donations in 2025 than it did last year. The party took £1.5m in Q1, compared to £3m in all of 2024. (The latter figure has been misreported as £4.75m, due to double-counting of donations made during the election period, which are listed twice on the Electoral Commission’s website.)
Farage’s party has sought to frame itself as an alternative to the political status quo of the Conservatives and Labour, yet this is at odds with its wealthy funders, many of whom are longtime political donors and paid-up members of the elite.
Commercial interests in regulated sectors such as energy and financial services are overrepresented among both the established political donors and the first-time donors that Reform has attracted.
As well as this cash from rich donors, Reform has likely raised a significant amount of money through its membership, which party figures say has been the main source of funding over the last year or so.
While Reform declined to provide details of its funding through membership and small donations, its own website says it has more than 233,000 members at the time of writing. If accurate, this would generate between £2.3m and £5.8m a year for the party, whose annual membership costs £25 or £10 for under-25s.
It is important in understanding Reform to note this element of its support, particularly at a time when Labour and the Conservative memberships are thought to be dropping significantly.
The estimated figures suggest that Reform’s claims of being driven by a grassroots movement are true, though so are claims from the party’s opponents that it is taking millions of pounds from the ultra-rich.
Who has donated to Reform?
More than half the £4.8m given to Reform since 2023 comes from people in its inner circle.
The party’s biggest donor is Richard Tice MP, its deputy leader, who has put more than £1m into its coffers, while Zia Yusuf, who spectacularly quit as party chair last week in a row over a burqa ban only to rejoin two days later in a similar role, has chipped in £206,000.
Holly Vukadinovic, better known as Holly Valance, who is married to the party’s main fundraiser, Nick Candy, has also given £50,000.
After Tice, the party’s top donor is Fiona Cottrell, an aristocratic socialite who once reportedly dated the King, who has given £750,000. Though she isn’t directly tied to the party, her son George Cottrell – nicknamed ‘Posh George’ – is a longtime associate of Farage and ran fundraising for his previous political party, UKIP, as a teenager.
George is today understood to be a close aide to Farage and, despite having no official role in the party, was last spotted alongside the Reform leader at a press conference this week. He is believed to live between the UK and Montenegro, where he has a number of business interests, including in cryptoassets.
Following Sarah Pochin’s election in May, Reform now has five sitting MPs again. Rupert Lowe, originally elected as a Reform MP, now sits as an independent having lost the party whip | Carl Court / Getty Images
As openDemocracy has reported, George recently set up opaque corporate entities in the UK and the US, which his lawyers told us will be political consulting firms.
Although George has not given money directly to Reform, he has funded trips for Farage to Belgium and the US worth around £25,000. Electoral rules state that an individual must be registered to vote in the UK – including as an overseas voter – in order to donate directly to political parties, but anyone can pay the “reasonable costs of a visit outside the UK”.
As the party has grown in influence, it has attracted the backing of many donors with a history of financially backing right-wing political projects. The majority previously gave money to the Conservative Party, but some have funded Farage’s former parties and the hard-right Reclaim Party, which is fronted by actor Laurence Fox.
David Lilley, who gave £274,000 to Reform, is a veteran hedge fund boss who co-founded Redwood Kite Capital alongside Tory peer Lord Michael Farmer. Both Red Kite and his current firm, Drakewood Capital Management, focus on mining and metals trading.
First Corporate Consultants, a think tank that has given Reform £200,000, is owned by Terence Mordaunt, former chair of the opaque think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) which campaigns as Net Zero Watch. openDemocracy revealed in 2022 that the GWFP has been funded by an oil-rich foundation with huge investments in energy firms.
We have also previously uncovered significant interests in fossil fuels held by Jeremy Hosking, who has given Reform £140,000 and whose fund, Hosking Partners, has tens of millions invested in oil firms and the wider fossil fuel sector. Hosking has poured millions into the UK right in the last decade, including backing Vote Leave to the tune of millions and more recently funding the Reclaim Party and The Critic, a conservative political and cultural magazine.
Nick Candy, a property mogul and former Tory donor who is now in charge of leading Reform’s fundraising efforts, has publicly stated that his strategy is to court ultra-wealthy donors in low-tax jurisdictions around the world with ties to the UK.
This plan only got underway in earnest toward the start of this year and any donations made in recent months are yet to be published. But Reform already has several confirmed donors resident in Monaco, according to corporate filings.
All in all, around £600,000 came from individuals and organisations either resident in perceived tax havens, or controlled via them. They include Roger Nagioff (£100,000), a former Lehman Bros executive now resident in Monaco according to corporate filings, and Luxembourg-based brokerage firm JB Drax Honore (£50,000), which donated through its UK subsidiary.
Some of Reform’s biggest donors, including Malcolm Robinson (£160,000) and Duncan Mackay (£100,000), have not yet been publicly identified.
Political parties have no obligation to publish any information about their donors other than names and details of the donation, and an unavoidable quirk of these donor transparency rules is that individuals with uncommon names are subject to greater scrutiny than those with common names, because they are easier to identify.
Jeremy Hosking was a major funder of the Brexit campaign and has backed a number of right-wing causes in the years since | Jack Taylor / Getty Images
openDemocracy asked Reform to provide a brief biography for several donors who have given more than £50,000 but are yet to be publicly identified, including Robinson and Mackay, but the party did not respond.
However, openDemocracy can reveal that Simon William Smith, who has given the party £58,000, is an ‘angel investor’ with significant interests in cryptocurrency and related technologies. Reform has pledged to deregulate crypto and reduce tax on capital gains made on it.
Reform has also attracted many first-time donors to its cause, with around a quarter of large donations during this period coming from people or organisations with no apparent history of donating to political parties.
Among them are people with a varied range of commercial interests and professional backgrounds. They range from a former BlackRock executive to a company specialising in stage lighting electronics. Some of these donors control companies providing services to local authorities, including in the social care sector, while another donor has previously spoken out about the impact of small boat crossings on his haulage firm.
Overall, though the interests of the party’s wealthy backers are varied, there are common themes and a clear relationship between their political and commercial interests and Reform’s platform. Many stand to benefit significantly from an anti-net zero push, cutting back regulation in finance or energy, lower taxes on wealth and the liberalisation of cryptoassets.
Billionaire backing
While some of the funders from the UKIP and Brexit Party phases of Farage’s political life are now Reform donors, there is currently one notable absentee.
Christopher Harborne is a British billionaire with interests primarily in the fuel and aviation sectors and cryptocurrency. Though much was made of a potential massive donation from Elon Musk to Reform, in Harborne, the party already seemingly has the support of an eccentric tech billionaire who has form for seriously altering the course of British politics with huge donations.
Over a couple of years, Harborne gave Farage’s Brexit Party millions, becoming one of the largest British political donors in the modern era. He also gave Boris Johnson £1m around the time his government started talking up the crypto industry.
While Harborne has yet to put money directly into Reform in its current form, he has funded trips to the US for Farage. As he has active links to both the UK and Thailand (where he has adopted the name Chakrit Sakunkrit), it is not clear whether he is eligible to donate directly to the party, though he does control trading UK companies, which would be able to donate.
Reform also arguably receives significant backing from another major backer of right-wing UK causes: GB News. If payments that the television channel made to Reform MPs for TV gigs were classed as political donations rather than individual earnings, GB News would have been Reform’s second-largest external donor since the start of 2023, giving around £490k. Most of that cash went to Farage, but another of the party’s MPs, former Tory Lee Anderson, is paid £100,000 per year to host a regular show on the channel.
Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Hedge fund Quadrature Capital has given £4m to Keir Starmer’s Labour – the largest donation in the party’s history | Jack Taylor – WPA Pool / Getty Images
Quadrature’s donation is noteworthy not just for being Labour’s largest-ever, but for its timing ahead of election
The Labour Party’s largest-ever donation came from a Cayman Islands-registered hedge fund with shares worth hundreds of millions of pounds in fossil fuels, private health firms, arms manufacturers and asset managers.
While the £4m donation by Quadrature Capital is the sixth-largest in British political history, it is noteworthy not just for its size, but also its timing.
Electoral Commission records suggest Labour received the donation in the one-week window between former prime minister Rishi Sunak announcing the general election and the start of the ‘pre-poll reporting period’ in which all political donations over £11,180 had to be published weekly, rather than the quarterly norm.
This means that despite being made on 28 May, Quadrature’s generous donation was published by the Electoral Commission only last week, more than two months after Labour won the election.
Neither the Labour Party press office nor No 10 responded to openDemocracy’s questions on whether the timing of accepting this donation was intended to minimise scrutiny and critical coverage during the election.
Paul Holden, an investigative journalist and author of The Fraud, a forthcoming book on Starmer’s leadership, told openDemocracy that the donation’s timing fits the Starmer project’s pattern of delaying the disclosure of potentially sensitive or controversial political donations.
Holden said: “Sir Keir Starmer and the organisations close to him have an unfortunate history of reporting donations in controversial ways.
“During his bid to become leader of the Labour Party, Starmer refused to contemporaneously publish details of who had donated to his leadership campaign. His rivals, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, agreed to share details of their donors in real-time, which they published. Starmer, however, decided only to declare his donations via his MP’s register of interests, which created a significant lag between when Starmer accepted his donations and when they were made public.
“Labour members, as a result, had no idea at the time of voting that Starmer had been funded with large donations from the likes of wealthy millionaires like Martin Taylor and Sir Trevor Chinn and Baron Waheed Ali; the latter now at the centre of the furore about Starmer’s acceptance of gratuities.”
Holden also referred to a fine issued by the Electoral Commission to Starmerite think tank Labour Together in 2021 for its failure to declare donations worth more than £800,000 – including £730,000 received while it was under the directorship of Starmer’s key adviser and No 10’s director of political strategy, Morgan McSweeney.
openDemocracy has consistently reported on Labour’s increasingly strong ties with the financial sector in recent years.
The party has received more than £8m from businesses or people linked to the financial industry since Starmer became leader in 2020 and now boasts two multi-million-pound donors from the world of hedge funds; Quadrature and Taylor, who has managed several billion-dollar funds over his career.
While Quadrature had not donated to Labour before May, one of its senior employees has contributed significantly to the party under Starmer. Daniel Luhde-Thompson, a strategic adviser at the firm, has given the party more than £500,000 this year, according to the Electoral Commission.
Transparency campaigners have warned Quadrature’s huge donation raises questions about what the financial sector is getting in return.
Rose Whiffen, senior research officer at Transparency International UK told openDemocracy: “When the public see political parties relying on such large sums of money in donations from private sources, it understandably raises questions as to in whose interest politicians are working and can give the impression our democracy is for sale.
“More must be done to take this kind of big money out of politics. The new government should commit to introducing caps on individual donations to tackle this problem [and] restore public trust in how our democracy functions.”
Green Party co-leader Zack Polanski told openDemocracy that the donation shows Labour now “stands for multi-millionaires and billionaires over our working-class communities”.
Polanski said: “Far from being the party in service of working people, Starmer’s Labour Party seems indebted to the bankers and bosses who profit from pillaging our public services and our planet.
“Simply ‘following the rules’ and declaring donations isn’t enough to cast aside the doubts that the main parties have their loyalties tested by big donors. It’s time to implement strict rules on funding political parties, including a cap on how much any individual or business can donate to politics. Elections should be won by the people with the best ideas, not the parties with the biggest donors.”
Registered in the Cayman Islands
Quadrature Capital has a diversified share portfolio worth around $6bn, according to records filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month.
After its donation was made public last week, the firm shared a statement on its website.
It said: “In May 2024, we came to the view that a UK government with a commitment to the green transition of the economy would have the ability to drive change that is so urgently needed. Having analysed commitments set out by each party, we donated £4m to The Labour Party, in support of policies that will deliver climate action while also promoting social equity and economic resilience.
“This was a values-based donation, not a political donation, as Quadrature Capital Ltd remains non-partisan and apolitical. Going forward, our private giving will continue to be led by our values, and any further donations to political parties will depend on the parties’ commitments, track record and alignment with our mission for sustainable and equitable growth.”
Last year, the Guardian reported that despite donating to environmental charities through its climate foundation, Quadrature had holdings in fossil fuel companies worth more than $170m. The paper highlighted three holdings in particular with major polluters: ConocoPhillips, Cheniere Energy and Cenovus Energy.
openDemocracy’s analysis of the firm’s latest SEC filings shows that Quadrature has since increased its holdings in Cenovus, which was this year fined millions for an oil spill that released 250,000 litres into the Atlantic Ocean. Quadrature has scaled back its holdings with the other two firms but has taken up a major $67m stake in ExxonMobil, one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world.
Among Quadrature Capital’s other investments, its largest holding is in Apple, valued at $231m, and among its 10 largest holdings are other ‘bluechip’ stocks like Amazon, Shopify and Costco.
Quadrature also maintains significant holdings in the arms manufacturers Northrop Grumman ($31m) and Lockheed Martin ($6m); US private healthcare companies such as UnitedHealth ($31m) and HCA Healthcare ($16m); some of the largest asset management companies like Blackstone ($22m) and KKR ($7m), who potentially stand to benefit significantly from Labour’s plans to utilise private investment for infrastructure; and tech firms, including Palantir ($71m) and Oracle ($8m).
UK accounts filings for the firm show profits before tax of more than £230m in the financial year ending 31 January 2023, but paid corporation tax of only £5.3m. As is noted in the accounts, had the firm paid the standard rate of UK corporation tax of 19% during that period, this would have amounted to more than £43m.
The UK-based fund paid out £343m in wages last year – an average of £3m for each of its 113 employees – while back in 2021 one of its founders was eyeing a luxury central London penthouse valued at around £110m, according to a report by Bloomberg that cited “two people with knowledge of the transaction”.
openDemocracy can reveal that Quadrature was last year acquired by QC Ventures, a company registered in the Cayman Islands, which is now the 100% shareholder in the firm.
The Cayman Islands is a well-known tax haven, and the transparency requirements for companies registered there are much less than in the UK and most other countries.
Documents obtained by openDemocracy show that when QC Ventures was established in the Cayman Islands back in 2018, its directors were three senior directors at Quadrature and a corporate services provider based in Cayman.
Speaking in the Commons in July, Labour’s foreign secretary David Lammy pledged to tackle individuals and companies taking advantage of offshore tax havens “with full vigour”.
He added: “We were concerned that parts of the last government were turning a blind eye to these issues. I hope to come forward with further proposals in the coming weeks.”
When openDemocracy contacted Quadrature to ask about the donation and the acquisition by QC Ventures, a representative of the firm directed us to the statement on the company’s website. They also said the decision to set up a holding company based in the Cayman Islands to acquire Quadrature was not motivated by, or related to, taxation.
Robert Palmer, director of Tax Justice UK, said that “any company moving to a tax haven like the Cayman Islands has questions to answer” as the islands are “notorious for a lack of transparency and for ultra-low taxes”.
“Ultimately governments need to make sure that everyone is paying their fair share in tax, especially when public services are desperately in need of investment and we need to fund the transition to a greener economy,” he said.
Fran Boait, co-executive director at Positive Money, said: “In taking large donations from financial firms registered in tax havens, we have to question what influence the sector is getting in return.
“Labour’s plans to continue the previous government’s deregulation of the City of London are particularly concerning, especially when it has been shown that an oversized financial sector hinders rather than helps the rest of the economy.
“Labour should be looking at how to weaken the power of big finance in our democracy and economy. Right now it seems they are doing the opposite.”
Original article by Ed Siddons republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Experts say authority is failing to punish the architects of tax-dodging schemes
The UK’s tax authority has not fined a single “enabler” of offshore tax evasion or non-compliance in five years despite landmark powers introduced in 2017, new figures reveal.
Industry experts criticised HMRC’s approach as “bizarre” and “bloody pointless” in light of the data, which was released under freedom of information laws to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).
They say it shows HMRC’s enforcement is failing to target the architects of offshore schemes while it aggressively pursues the clients, some of whom say they are the victims of schemes sold to them as lawful.
The findings follow revelations by TBIJ and the Observer that prosecutions for tax crimes have plummeted. HMRC has also not charged a single company or partnership for enabling tax evasion since laws introduced in 2017 provided expanded powers to crack down on the “enablers” of tax dodging.
Tax evasion and avoidance are key battlegrounds in the forthcoming election. Both Labour and the Conservatives have made ambitious pledges to raise billions through targeted pursuit of tax dodgers and the elimination of tax breaks for non-doms, people living in the UK who claim their permanent home is overseas.
“The neverending stream of new HMRC powers … are bloody pointless if the powers aren’t then used,” said Dan Neidle, the founder of the independent thinktank Tax Policy Associates and former head of tax at global law firm Clifford Chance.
He said in primarily penalising the taxpayers, who in some cases believed the schemes were legal because they were misleadingly marketed, HMRC is failing to address “the root source of the problem: the people offshore pimping these schemes”.
HMRC defines an enabler as “any person who knowingly helps their client to avoid or evade tax”. Targeting them, not just the tax evader, became a central pillar of HMRC’s strategy during the 2010s.
“Enablers were and still are a big focus for HMRC,” said Michelle Sloane, a tax disputes partner at law firm RPC. “But these figures show their rhetoric on tackling enablers … is clearly not being followed through with action.”
Before 2014, HMRC struggled to crack down on offshore tax dodging due to limited data on accounts overseas. But that year saw the approval by tax authorities around the world of the Common Reporting Standard, a measure that made financial institutions share information across borders. That allowed HMRC and other tax authorities unprecedented oversight of where taxpayers had stashed money overseas.
HMRC also began cooperating with other major tax authorities through the J5, a coalition of tax authorities founded to tackle tax evasion and money laundering.
Meanwhile, the revelations in the Panama Papers in 2016 marked a turning point in HMRC’s pursuit of the middlemen who helped to hide money from tax authorities. The offshore enabler penalty was introduced in 2017, alongside a raft of new powers to make it easier to punish perpetrators.
The penalty could include a £3,000 fine or 100% of the amount of tax that was dodged, whichever was larger.
See original article for embedded graphic. Embedded graphic has the title ‘
Offshore riches
Money held by UK taxpayers in foreign accounts outstrips a year’s worth of all tax owed in the country’
But the new figures show compliance enforcement is “not what you’d be expecting, based on their focus on enablers and all the sources of information that they have available to them”, said Sloane. “It’s an area I expect the next government will wish to concentrate on.”
Stephen Daly, a tax academic at King’s College London, called the lack of any offshore enablers penalties “bizarre”. “Why would the government want to introduce such a power only to leave it sitting idly by?”
The findings compound pressure on HMRC after revelations that the authority does not know how much is lost to offshore tax dodging each year.
HMRC estimates that it collects 95% of all the tax owed in the UK, but the remaining 5% accounted for about £36bn in lost revenue in 2021-22.
And figures HMRC disclosed to Tax Policy Associates in 2021 revealed that UK taxpayers held £850bn in foreign accounts in 2019, of which £570bn was in tax havens.
However, HMRC said in a freedom of information response to the thinktank that it had not “produced or received any estimates” on how much is being lost to unlawful offshore schemes.
In June 2022, Lucy Frazer, then financial secretary to the Treasury, said HMRC would produce data on the “offshore tax gap” in 2023. But still no data has been published.
Whoever wins the election, some experts say they will need to make substantial investments in HMRC’s investigative teams if they want to raise funds for the public purse by closing the tax gap.
Commenting on the scale of revenue lost offshore, Dan Neidle said, “On the evasion side, we don’t really know, because we’ve got no data – [while] on the avoidance schemes offshore, HMRC seem ineffective at stopping the promoters.
“If it’s as much as single-figure billions, that’s a good result. But it’s going to take criminal sanctions on promoters to stop this.”
An HMRC spokesperson said: “We have a strong track record in tackling offshore non-compliance. Since the launch of our No Safe Havens strategy in 2019, we have secured almost £700m from offshore initiatives.”
Original article by Ed Siddons republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
‘If the government is concerned about fraud, it would be serious about the £15.2bn that multinational companies hide from the UK via tax havens.’
As the government continues to crack down on so-called benefit fraud and reform the welfare system with stricter measures, newly released statistics by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that there were almost no recorded cases of disability fraud in the financial year ending 2024.
Disability Living Allowance fraud was just 0.1 percent, rounded off to £0m. Personal independence payment (PIP) cheating was found to be 0 percent in the same period, the data showed.
PIP overpayments represented 0.4 percent, equating to around £90m lost in a year, marking a significant decrease from the previous year, when such overpayments stood 1.1 percent (£200m). The overpayments were said to be mainly due to errors made by the department when allocating award levels at the assessment stage.
In response to the DWP’s figures, Mikey Erhardt, campaigner at Disability Rights UK described PIP fraud as a ‘non-issue.’
“New data shows what we, as disabled people, have known for years – PIP fraud is a non-issue. PIP fraud is now the lowest on record – despite the government placing fraud front and centre of their latest public announcements,” said Erhardt.
